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11 thoughts on “Research”

What specific field is this research? I’m applying to colleges right now, for my Bachelors, and I need to know if I’m picking the right track. As of right now my education track is: Bachelors: (Double) CompSci + Mathematics, Masters: Mathematics, PhD: CompSci. I’d like to work as a professor/researcher in a university doing research on new algorithms, specifically prime factorization. Thanks!

Then you want to study “theoretical computer science.” Depending on where you go it’s either in the mathematics department or the computer science department, so you should look at both, and in the CS department you should look for the “theory” groups.

But lots of schools have perfectly good (albeit smaller) theory programs. My university, for example, University of Illinois at Chicago (not to be confused with U Chicago) is great for me. And from what everyone tells me it doesn’t matter where you get your PhD from, so long as you’re doing good research and are in contact with lots of researchers.

Thanks for all the information! I’m looking at Texas A&M as my primary, but UW is on my list. How do you call the actual job? And what is the best way to get into that research area (Professor/Govt./Private Compant/etc.)?

Then the job title is “researcher,” but really I am still in graduate school. My own personal goal is to be a professor at a research institution, or a researcher at an industry research lab (such as Microsoft research or a government lab).

I mean private as opposed to government. Goverment labs are like Lawrence Livermore, Argonne, and Lawrence Berkeley. Industry labs are like MIT-Lincoln Lab, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! Research, Google Research, IBM Research. I don’t know of a single place that lists all of the labs.

Clearly brilliant, multi-talented, creative: don’t waste it by fitting yourself into a mold. You already know how to teach yourself math, stats, CS. Computational neuroscience is where you would blossom. The world stagnates because people follow obvious paths. Given your knowledge, you should NOT go into math, CS, stats, or any of that, You have that covered. Computational neuroscience is supposed to be a mathematical exploration of the brain, but no one is creative and no one knows any math. You’d set it on fire. But see papers by Eero Simoncelli, Tomaso Poggio, Edward Adelson, Bruno Olshausen, and especially Hopfield 82. For an example of not so creative papers see DC Bradley in Nature 95, Science 96, Nature 98, Nature Neuroscience 2004, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2008. Successful, but mostly dogmatic (except the 2004 paper). But I know the field needs to become mathematical the way physics did around 1900.

I was a tenured professor at the University of Chicago, computational neuroscience. I’m now chief of research at Intellisis in San Diego. I create mathematical approaches to autonomous perception using neural algorithms. I’d be happy to advise you in any way I can. I don’t recommend academia; it’s dying. Funding agencies stifle any real exploration; universities tie up faculty with nonsense activities. If you love math and science, stay away from it, it’s all reputation building. Nor can you be creative at corporations like micro$osft or IBM. If you have an idea, it has to trickle upward for a year. Govt labs will suffocate you. Startups are your best bet if the CEO has vision. Qualcomm and Intellisis are good (both San Diego), though Qualcomm is not a startup. Your friend j2kun has good advice.

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